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(slow organ music)

Narrator: Our civilization is built on AC power,

remote control, and radio waves for wireless communications.

Imagine our lives without these technologies,

without the internet and mobile telephones

and the connectedness that they have brought us.

Looking back at the beginning of the 20th century,

the technologies that shape our lives today

were invented by one inspired man.

- He pretty much single handedly jump started

the Second Industrial Revolution.

He was called 'the inventor of the 20th century' back then

when the 20th century started.

And then, all of a sudden, we all forgot about him

and he got excluded from school books and everything.

(quirky electronic music)

Nikola: My name is Nikola Tesla.

(slow folk music)

Narrator: Tesla believed that electric energy

should be considered the same as the air that we breathe

because, in nature, it is present in unlimited quantities.

- Tesla's articles were published

and republished by many magazines and newspapers.

He was widely quoted, widely followed.

He was, here in New York, socially very well-known.

He was the ultimate gentleman; a black tie, white tailed.

He was a great admirer of Sarah Bernhardt

and other New York figures.

He was known on the social scene.

Tesla was a combination of a gentleman,

a combination of society figure, scientist,

and a great engineer.

- Well, during Tesla's life,

he was one of the most famous people in the entire world.

His fame for electricity

overshadowed Thomas Edison's fame, I'm sure.

Narrator: When all the newspapers were only writing about

Nikola Tesla's new inventions and achievements,

Edison began to execute animals on the streets of New York

to show how dangerous Nikola Tesla's electricity was.

Edison's hatred of Nikola Tesla

and his electromagnetic motor got him to the point

where Edison's company invented the electric chair.

(quirky electronic music)

Nikola: If you to find the secrets of the universe,

think in terms of energy, frequency, and vibration.

Narrator: But his biggest project was to provide us

with free wireless power transmission on Earth.

The project was called Wardenclyffe Tower.

(speaking foreign language)

He is enigmatic.

He is mysterious.

His ideas are mysterious.

And that, of course, also perhaps made the committee

that is more traditional in its view of scientific problems

and so on that they thought,

"Interesting, but let's wait and see."

But his vision for the system of communication

is, for example, exactly what we're doing.

- Nikola Tesla was given this strange diagnosis

by many writers.

I disagree with them.

As a psychologist, I get to see a lot of people

with obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Nikola Tesla, for example, I would say, was a creative.

He was somebody who could get so involved

in all of his projects that he would be consumed totally.

And whenever a creative person is creating,

they're creating something totally new,

something totally different.

It's an escape.

It's not the reality we know.

When he talked about

you might be able to carry this instrument

in your pocket or your hands

and you could see a loved one from way across the world

and talk to them at the same time

and put it in your back pocket, people at that time,

they weren't ready for his kind of genius.

This was a man who was known to speak over six languages.

This was a man who was very well-read.

You need a certain kinda divergent thinking

in order for you to be able to think outside the box.

- In the year 1900,

he forecast that you and I would have a cell phone.

In 1900, he knew that you could wirelessly communicate

and he knew that at some point

not only would you wirelessly be able to communicate voice

but you could wirelessly be able to communicate pictures.

He saw all of that going into the future.

Narrator: In his patent

A Method of Signaling and System of Signaling,

he describes in 1900 how messages of information

should be wirelessly transferred with radio waves,

but that electric waves

would not be electromagnetic, as hertz waves.

His observation and work

was to make the transmission of information highly private,

that messages could not be interfered with,

intercepted, or disturbed in any way,

which is not the case with Hertzian waves.

- Transmission of electricity by wirelessly

is theoretically possible.

There are all kinds of practical issues with it.

There are political issues with it.

We already have people who are very concerned

about the electromagnetics given off by cell phones.

Man: The wavelengths of the Tesla frequencies

are extremely long, so there's no way that your body

can get any electromagnetism out of it.

It's just the electrostatic.

The electrostatic is very closely related

to the orgone or the life force.

(speaking foreign language)

- Tesla's frequencies, they behave in a different manner.

They actually have been found to be beneficial

and were used for medical purposes for quite some time.

But that's how Tesla continued to make money

after the Wardenclyffe dive,

because he worked for these electrotherapeutic companies

like Fischer that made all of these Tesla transmitters

and then they would apply the frequencies to the body

and they were found to be beneficial

because they're a different type of frequency.

(broken radio transmission)

- I mean, they had nothing to work with hardly.

They had some wire and silk wrap

and some wooden blocks and some brass screws,

and they built this whole theory and proved everything

with virtually nothing.

Now, what kind of intellect can do that?

There's nobody on the planet today that could do that.

Outta six billion people, there isn't one.

(radio static crackling)

- He didn't sleep much.

He didn't need to sleep

because he was nurtured by the prana,

by life energy, by frequency,

and that's what he was all about.

He was all about frequency.

Narrator: Everything in our reality

has its own frequency.

As we know, we can see between 440 and 770 terahertz.

We hear between 20 and 20,000 hertz.

Our heart beats at a frequency of 1 to 1.67 hertz.

And our brain functions

at a frequency between 0.5 and 30 hertz.

The higher the frequency of the brain,

the more alert or stressed we are.

Now, Earth also has its own frequency,

and it is the same as our brain

when it is in a state of telepathic possibilities

or state of global awareness.

It is 7.83 hertz.

Nikola: The gift of mental power comes from God,

divine being.

And if we concentrate our minds on the truth,

we become in-tune with this great power.

Narrator: Nikola Tesla's father was an orthodox priest,

and the same fate was waiting for young Tesla.

However, his mother inspired him to invent.

She came from an inventor's family

and was an inventor herself.

From an early age, she played memory

and telepathic games with her children.

That is how she encouraged a special kind of thinking.

At a very young age, he constructed a water turbine.

He was fascinated by description of Niagara Falls

that he found in books.

In his imagination,

he pictured a big wheel powered by the falls.

30 years later, his childhood dream would come true.

(speaking foreign language)

- All of his inventions would come,

he said it would come with a flash of light in his head

and a big migraine, and then he would see the device.

He was able to visualize the device

that came with this flash of light in such detail

that he didn't need to make a blueprint to build it.

- And he'd see the schematic and that's all he'd see.

He couldn't see people, he couldn't see anything else

until that went away.

But it was frozen in his mind long enough

for once it went away, he could sit down and draw it out,

all the detail, dimensions, everything.

It was really weird, but in his way, he used it as a tool.

(slow piano music)

- His thought, his thinking, his genius

rose above his origin

and the tiny little village in which he was born

and the country in which we were born,

a country that (sighing) I would say is

an unhappy place historically.

Nikola: I am equally proud of my Serbian origin

and Croatian homeland.

- He invented radio control robots

so that people wouldn't have to go to war anymore.

They could just send the machines to fight each other!

But that didn't work.

But he was not naive about the problems of human nature

and what humanity as a group has to go through

to emerge at this higher level of maturity.

Woman: His big dream was that planet Earth

will be endless source of energy

and we will not need any gas, oil,

any corporations, any wars, and all the bullshit.

- So, in his vision, it would be a society

that's not driven by material gain.

It would be a society that's driven by connecting mankind

to the highest possible level.

- But I think the kind of ideal world he had,

we are not ready for it.

We have to change consciousness.

It's all about how the human can change his consciousness.

By changing consciousness,

we can change the rest of the world

with our own consciousness.

- Because consciousness

is not something you're manufacturing in your brain.

Consciousness is your brain

and your whole body acting as an antenna,

tapping into this field of information.

And I think Tesla knew this

and he was very, very protective of that field

so that he could download incredible information

and apply it to technologies.

- I think a lot of this personality of Tesla,

that he tells the press that he's counting his silverware,

he's polishing this, he doesn't wanna shake hands,

he doesn't like pearls, things of that nature.

And I thought, "This is his way

"of fooling the press a little bit."

(slow piano music)

- When you become aware

that you're bathing in this field of information

and you become better at controlling it

and expecting and extracting information from it,

you become more sensitive to what's around you,

the people that are around you,

what they're thinking, how they influence the field.

And that's why he didn't like to shake hands with people.

He was very aware of any energies

that were not of the highest.

When he was trying to concentrate

and download the information,

he didn't necessarily want somebody around him

that was kind of messing up the field.

- That's also the reason why

he probably didn't wanna get involved with a woman ever,

because he could see the patterns of that into the future.

He could see what it would entail

for him to have a relationship with,

any kind of intimate relationship with a person,

how much it would take away from inventing

all the stuff that we now take for granted.

- He castrated himself not to have sex,

'cause all this energy, he will dedicate it to science.

I think, when you are such a degree of genius,

solitude is something that you have to deal with

all your life.

Nikola: My brain is only a receiver.

In the universe, there is a core

from which we obtain knowledge, strength, and inspiration.

I have not penetrated into the secrets of this core,

but I know that it exists.

(phone ringing)

- Yeah, basically, he was the first one

to come up with a workable radio system.

Radio, as he usually conceived it,

was probably very similar to what we do now,

but he realized very quickly

that it's extremely inefficient.

And you have to understand that Tesla's focus

was totally on efficiency

of the energy economics of the system.

His electrodes were actually virtual antenna

that was strictly for the storage of charge

on a temporary basis.

The actual signal was sent into the Earth.

Narrator: He discovered that the Earth

is a conductor of unlimited dimensions,

like a vast reservoir,

and behaves like an ocean when disturbed.

No matter how much along its axis

the Earth is disturbed with electric waves,

it always keeps the same natural frequency.

(speaking foreign language)

Narrator: He discovered the natural frequency

of the Earth.

And not only that, he also discovered

that the frequency that the Earth harmonizes with

is an odd number.

Nikola: If you only knew the magnificence

of the three, six, and nine,

then you would have a key to the universe.

Woman: Attention: You're in ether.

Narrator: In Tesla's time

of discovering radio wave transmission,

it was believed that they were traveling through ether.

- All the way up to 1905,

there's an energetic ether or an energetic substrate.

It's absent for 25 years from 1905 to 1930,

where the belief of the scientific community was it's empty.

From 1930 on,

when quantum electric dynamics became accepted,

it came back as a far more energetic model.

So, it's ironic that our beliefs today

are dominated from such a small little window of history.

- And a lotta people look at empty space

and they think it's actually empty

when it's filled with infinite potential.

Narrator: He also wrote a formula for human energy

that is the mass squared of velocity.

He said, "Velocity is a force

"governing everything in nature."

If we look to Einstein's famous formula of relativity,

it is the same, just that Einstein defined velocity

as the speed of light instead of ether.

He discovered that the discharged electricity

of lightning in Earth

travel from one side of the Earth to another

at a speed of 471,240 kilometers per second.

That is how he proved that the speed of light

was not the ultimate speed in our reality.

- What we have not yet managed to do is to unite gravity,

which is the classical theory still,

the classical theory of Einstein,

and the quantum physical description

of our other interactions.

The basic question is can you find one law

which contains all the different interactions in nature

in one single expression?

(speaking foreign language)

Narrator: In 1900, he describes the importance

of producing electrical power from renewable energy sources.

He also described a wireless power transmission

and transfer through a natural medium: Earth.

Woman: Every year, the level of temperatures

of our planet are rising

because of the enormous usage of fossil fuels and coal.

But if we would listen to Nikola Tesla

and his plan for our future,

we would not deal with climate changes now.

- I believe that mankind has looked at climate change

in that same way, as if it were a fiction,

as if pretending that climate change wasn't real

would somehow make it go away.

But I think we all know better than that now.

Every week, we're seeing new and undeniable climate events,

evidence that accelerated climate change is here right now.

Droughts are intensifying,

our oceans are acidifying with methane plumes

rising up from the ocean floor.

We are seeing extreme weather events

in the West Antarctic and Greenland Ice Sheets

melting at unprecedented rates,

decades ahead of scientific projections.

The time to answer humankind's greatest challenge is now.

- There are about seven billion people in the world.

And so, now, not only do we have to find energy for people,

but we have to do it in such a way

so that it will not continue adding carbon dioxide

and other greenhouse gases.

(speaking foreign language)

- What's incredible to me

is that his name is now a brand of a car. (laughing)

And that's how the majority of people know him.

- But that was not Martin Abrahams idea.

He was a fan of Nikola Tesla,

particularly because Nikola Telsa

invented the three-phase motor and three-phase electricity.

And all of these motors that we use

to drive these vehicles are three-phase motors.

And it's one of those things

that it seems it's obviously a very good idea

after somebody thought of it,

but somebody had to think of it first,

and that was Nikola Tesla.

- Tesla was studying three years in Graz.

In the first two years, he was very successful.

He was really good in mathematics and physics.

Narrator: But one day, a new invention of that time

came from Paris.

It was Gramme's dynamo.

While Professor Poeschl was making demonstrations,

the brushes caused a problem, sparking badly.

Tesla commented that it might be possible

to operate a motor without these appliances.

Professor Poeschl remarked that Mr. Tesla

might accomplish great things,

but that he would certainly never achieve that.

It would be the equivalent of converting

a steadily-pulling force like that of gravity

into a rotary effort.

It is a perpetual motion scheme, an impossible idea.

Being humiliated in front of the whole class

made Tesla shift his thinking to accept the challenge

and prove that the impossible was possible.

He left the university.

He needed money.

That is why he went to an industrial town, Maribor,

where Nikola Tesla met Karl Scherbaum,

who was trying to construct a little power station

to produce electricity out of his bakery.

Tesla got involved with this project.

After he shared his ideas of the dynamo improvement

and how to connect it to a steam mill,

the police arrested him.

The official police report from the 24th of March, 1879,

says, "Nikola Tesla had to be escorted by police guard

"to his hometown, Gospic.

"The reason: no money, no job,

"and no vision for the future."

Only he knew that he was close to an invention

that could change the whole world,

but no one believed him anymore.

Nikola: Energy of a single thought

may determine the motion of a universe.

Narrator: To fulfill the last wish of his father,

he went to Prague and signed up for philosophical studies

at the Charles University.

In Prague, he spent most of the time

in the Klementinum Library.

Earth's magnetic field

makes the moon rotate around our planet.

The sun makes the Earth and moon rotate

by its strong magnetic field around the sun.

But how to imitate that magnetic field from the cosmos

into the rotation of a motor.

In Budapest, he was focusing so much on his invention

that he got sensitive to any vibration.

The whistle of a locomotive 30 miles away

made vibrations so strong

that the pain in his body was unbearable.

The ground under his feet trembled continuously.

And then, one day,

his motor appeared in his mind.

(ethereal music)

(folksy piano music)

1884.

Nikola Tesla arrives in America.

- Tesla, who came on his own volition

with essentially no family or no money available to him,

only a letter of credit from the Edison functions in Paris.

Narrator: Edison gives him a job, but is not interested

in Tesla's electromagnetic motor invention.

He is there to improve Edison direct current motors.

Edison promises him $50,000 for that.

- And Edison had all these problems

with these big DC systems

'cause they are creating these massive magnetic fields;

I mean, just massive.

You're running DC current down from one end of Manhattan

to the other through cables; I mean, cables this big.

Thousands of amps at just 100 volts

'cause Edison didn't like voltage.

So, he worked with everything at 100 volts,

which is, from an engineering standpoint, is brain-dead,

but he was convinced 100 volts wouldn't kill anybody.

Narrator: Tesla makes 24 new designs for him,

but the payment turns out to be just a joke.

Tesla answered Edison's joke

by patenting all the improvements he did for Edison

so that Edison could not legally use Tesla's unpaid work.

This sets off a rivalry between Tesla and Edison.

The climax of their competition

was when Nikola Tesla, together with Westinghouse,

signed a contract to light up Chicago.

Man: The age of electricity had arrived.

Narrator: Chicago was the first city in the world

lit by electric power, and it was Nikola Tesla's invention

of an electromagnetic motor that produced AC power.

That was a truly historical moment

and the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.

27 million visitors from 46 countries

from all around the world came to see the exhibition.

Tesla proved that he was the most important inventor

in the world

and that the impossible was possible

if you followed your dreams and instinct.

The world at once knew the name Nikola Tesla.

- Tesla's first connection was to connect Niagara Falls,

the electric energy from Niagara Falls,

to the electric grid.

Thomas Edison was still relying on coal.

- Tesla achieved replacing all the coal,

individual coal-fired plants that were in people factories

that were sickening and poisoning everybody around him,

into electric motors and cleaning the whole thing up.

- But the ultimate goal was to take from a source

that was basically free.

Of course, then the power from Niagara Falls

was transmitted via a polyphase power system

to cities like Buffalo and New York City.

Narrator: He developed 40 inventions

for producing and distributing electric energy.

In all this time, changes were only made

in the development of materials.

His invention of the AC power system

are still being used today and have remained unchanged.

(speaking foreign language)

- Tesla was the father of renewable energy

because hydroelectric power is renewable.

The water evaporates, it comes down as rain,

fills the lakes,

because those sources do not provide CO2 into the atmosphere

and they do not therefore create a climate change problem.

- The electric cars have been around for a very long time.

In the early-1900s, there were quite a few electric cars.

For a while there,

they were more popular than gasoline cars

'cause you didn't have to start them with a crank handle.

But the batteries, of course, weren't great.

So, the big thing that's changed now

is that we've got vastly better batteries,

and of course we've got all the electronics

and software to control the motors.

So, electric cars actually predated gasoline cars.

(ethereal music)

Part of the vision of the Tesla founders

was to change the public perception of electric cars,

and I think that Tesla Motors has succeeded

enormously well at doing that.

First, you have to remember this was 2003,

so that's the year that the California mandate

for zero-emission vehicles got repealed

and you couldn't buy an electric car.

All of the ones that had been on the market,

like the General Motors EV1 were taken off the market,

and the EV1s were actually taken back

by General Motors and crushed.

Well, the only reason

that people didn't all drive electric cars

was 'cause, well, you couldn't buy one. (laughing)

Someone had to make one.

There's a great tendency for people to think

that electric cars are zero-emission.

Well, they're zero-emission at the car.

But if you plug them into the grid,

then they're getting electricity from the national grid,

and a lot of that is still coal.

So, in the US, that's about 40%.

In Australia, it's 69%.

In China, it's over 90% coal.

So, it depends where you are.

For most countries in the world,

if you plug an electric car into the grid,

you're burning coal.

Narrator: What if an alternative system already exists,

one that could charge our telephones,

computers, and electric cars wirelessly?

(speaking foreign language)

Woman: Tesla intended for this place

to be what he called his radio city.

He intended it to be a place of communication system

and an energy-generating facility.

Narrator: In 1901, he began to build

his Wardenclyffe Tower as a magnifying transmitter.

- He was trying to build a huge Tesla coil

that would electrify the ionosphere and enable free power

for everybody that has an antenna.

He would imitate lightning and reflect them to the Earth.

That electric charge that would accumulate

in the globe of the tower

would then be transmitted in pulses through the Earth.

Like that, energy and information

would be transmitted instantly

to every point on Earth into a small device.

It is this patent that our mobile telephones

as well as wifi devices were developed from.

But how would we use that?

We would stick a device like a wifi modem

directly with the wire into the ground

in front of our house.

This would receive power and information from the Earth

and at the same time distribute it further through the air

to devices that need electric energy to work.

Each device would then have a small receiver

the size of a watch that would be placed into the product,

like receivers of wifi transmission today in computers,

which detect these signals.

Our mobiles would work the same way,

just that the signal would be covered everywhere you go

and not change by bad weather.

In addition, we would not need to charge them

or anything else anymore.

Tesla envisioned that we would power not only houses

but cars, trains, and airplanes too.

It would not be necessary to dig into the Earth

for fossil fuels or coal anymore.

We would use the Earth and ionizing air

to do what nature naturally uses it to do.

(speaking foreign language)

Narrator: The tower was almost completely finished,

but Tesla was left without money.

- JP Morgan was one of the main financial backers for Tesla

with this project.

There came a point when Guglielmo Marconi

sent a trans-Atlantic message,

made a big splash with what he was able to do.

Meanwhile, he had been using Tesla's patents

and Tesla's work to be able to do that.

What Morgan had supported here

was the idea that Tesla would be able to send

that kind of communication.

So, once Marconi did it,

Morgan no longer had any use for what Tesla was doing.

It had already been done by someone else.

And so, his interest in supporting the continued work here

was no longer part of his plan.

Tesla went to him and said, "Well, I have greater plans

"than just sending a trans-Atlantic message.

"I want to create an opportunity for people to have

"unlimited amounts of energy transported."

- JP Morgan said, "Nobody's pulling up to my gas pump

"and getting the gas for free,"

and Nikola Tesla wanted to give it to the world for free

for the betterment of mankind.

Nikola: For our existence and comfort,

we require heat, light, and mechanical power.

How do we now get all these things?

We get them from fuel.

We get them by consuming material.

What will man do when the forests disappear,

when the coalfields are exhausted?

- They literally turned off the public's mind.

They manipulated the public's mind.

They'd hypnotize 'em into a sleep and forgetfulness.

The media was new and fresh then and they realized

that they could really manipulate whole populations with it,

and that's what they did with Nikola Tesla.

They took this new form, the new mediums,

they bought up all the newspapers,

and they used it to put the public to sleep about this.

- "Tesla's work holds the mark of genius

"and he has been a pioneer

"in vast fields of electrotechnology.

"However, his contributions lie too far back in time,

"40 years, to be considered for a Nobel Prize award."

Interesting is that the Nobel Committee really states

that Tesla's work holds the mark of genius.

Narrator: Was that really the reason

why Tesla did not get the Nobel Prize in 1937,

because his inventions were too old?

Or was there something else that happened before

that prevented him from getting the Nobel Prize?

(radio static crackling)

(telegraph machine beeping)

In 1909, the Nobel Prize in Physics

was given to Guglielmo Marconi

for recognition to contributions

of the development of wireless telegraphy.

- They underline that Tesla had made

the most crucial improvements.

Since we have known that Marconi got the prize,

you can't go back.

If you have a made a decision, it might be totally wrong.

- He would never be granted a patent

because Tesla already had the patents granted in his name.

But after he became associated with JP Morgan,

magically, the patents were granted.

So, money has a lot to say about how these things get done.

Narrator: The last years of Tesla's life

were mostly spent in court,

defending his patents and inventions.

Marconi's company was selling licenses

for radio transmission in the US

and getting big fees for using radio transmission.

But when they also wanted to get paid from the US government

for their contribution of using radio communication

in World War I, the trial started.

There were enormous financial interests behind this trial.

- And all that information was then used

to form the RCA Corporation,

which became a very big moneymaker for the establishment.

- And at that time,

that's when they started to attack his reputation,

try to make him look like a kook and a crank in the press.

By the early-'40s, he had been nearly forgotten.

- For many years, Nikola Tesla lived in the Waldorf-Astoria.

And over that time, John Jacob Astor and he were friends.

Once Astor died in the Titanic,

the property at the Waldorf was owned by another man;

his name was George Boldt.

And not long after that, Mr. Boldt died.

And over those years, Tesla wasn't paying his rent.

He was living there on credit.

And once those two gentlemen died,

Boldt's heirs decided they wanted to have Tesla

pay what he owed them, and he didn't have the money.

So, the heirs to George Boldt brought him to court.

In 1915, he lost ownership of the property

and it was taken over by those people he owed a debt to,

primarily the heirs to the Waldorf-Astoria.

- They did everything in the power to discredit him

so he would never be able to achieve that,

that he would never be able to get funding

from somebody else to achieve free energy,

which I think was one of the biggest crimes against humanity

that ever happened.

(plodding piano music)

Nikola: I don't care that they stole my idea.

I care that they don't have any of their own.

Narrator: It is time to learn the truth

about wireless power transmission,

which once existed on Earth,

not only as an idea but as a functional system

from which we still use today's systems of communication.

- We started putting the pieces together

and started doing experimentation

where we actually have duplicated some of his work,

and especially with his power claims

that he could generate massive amounts of electricity

for small amounts of horsepower,

which means I don't have to burn coal and oil

in great big mountains to get my electricity.

We could take power out, get 50 watts in,

take that same power we use,

send it back through the transformer

and cancel out the input power

and measure one watt at the transformer

and 50 watts at the pole.

- Wrightspeed is a powertrain company.

We make powertrains, not vehicles;

all the stuff that makes them go.

And they're electric powertrains for heavy-duty vehicles.

The big difference though with this

is that it's got an onboard generator for the range extender

that can burn fuel onboard

and make electricity to keep the battery charged,

so you can keep driving forever.

- Hyperloops is often called

the fifth mode of transportation.

Imagine a capsule and moving

basically just below the speed of sound.

So, the capsule levitates

through a passive magnetic levitation technology

called Inductrack.

The whole system is powered by alternative energy.

So, you have solar panels along the track,

so using the same right-of-way.

And we're using wind,

kinetic energy through regenerative breaking,

and, depending on the climate, even geothermal

to potentially produce more energy

than we're actually using.

We realized very early on

that in order to make Hyperloop happen,

we needed to build more than just a company.

We needed to build a movement.

I think that if you have a single person like Nikola Tesla

who has great ideas, great capabilities,

and what it really takes then to move it forward

is to find other people passionate about the same thing

that help him to elevate the thing.

It's always good to have the genius

and also understand how to get something to the market.

- And apparently, Swamiji and Tesla got along very well.

Tesla was very impressed with him, and Swamiji also.

In Tesla's writing, he always used these Sanskrit terms.

(speaking foreign language) can be translated as 'ether',

basic building blocks of nature.

So, even before creation, this ether will exist.

And Swamiji thought that he could mathematically prove

the equivalency, so that matter and energy

were not two different things.

And Swamiji felt that if Tesla could do this,

this would give him mathematical proof to this idea

that was accepted thousands of years ago in India.

- Our main goal is to understand better

what was the evolution of the laws of nature

in the very early moments of the universe,

just after the Big Bang.

We have now approached that initial moment

to about one-trillionth of a second.

I mean, what don't know what caused the Big Bang

and we don't know what kind of energy was available

because we have no way of going beyond the Big Bang.

So, I guess that's a metaphysical question.

Nikola: The day science begins to study

nonphysical phenomena,

it will make more progress in one decade

than in all the previous centuries of its existence.

Narrator: To understand the Wardenclyffe project,

do we need a small shift in our understanding?

(electricity crackling)

- Boy, nobody ever asks the question:

What did he do with a Tesla coil?

He had ways to where he could take that high voltage

and oscillate at right frequencies

to where he could trick electrons

in a way to where they opened what we call the ether valve.

Some of the experiments,

he would go to the far end of Long Island

in the darkest, darkest part he could get away from lights

and then he'd hook up

this small high-voltage Tesla coil-type system he had.

And what it would do, it would take the layers of nitrogen

in the atmosphere along that wire and it would ionize

and he would strip the electrons off that layer of gas.

And then, all of a sudden,

he would light up acres and acres and acres of forest,

and every air molecule was emitting light.

- Our consciousness is not in the brain.

That's mechanical.

Consciousness is connected to all consciousnesses.

They're all connected together.

And the computer, if you will,

to which our consciousness is connected is the brain.

Narrator: With the Wardenclyffe Tower,

he would increase the natural potential of the Earth.

But that would also increase our consciousness.

- In 1917, on the Fourth of July,

they set dynamite to the statue.

They hoped to be able to get some money back

on what Tesla owed them by selling the tower for scrap.

Narrator: Edison started to build

his motion picture empire,

connecting all the people in the US

that had inventions in motion pictures under a corporation

called the Motion Pictures Patent Company,

known also as the Edison Trust.

The Edison Trust would issue licenses

to all the producers or distributors

who dared to deal in motion pictures.

But there were independent producers

that pirated films and equipment from Europe

and were secretly shooting films in the US

without Edison's approval.

Even Charlie Chaplin was a star in Europe

through the pirated films

brought by these producers to Europe

while, in the US, he could not be seen on screen

because of the Edison Trust license.

The Edison Trust was made to have control

over what is produced and distributed

in motion pictures in the US.

Edison had to be sure that nothing about Tesla

would come to the big screen.

(speaking foreign language)

Narrator: Independent producers

were fighting with Edison.

And to get far away from Edison,

they began to build a motion picture town: Hollywood,

a place where there was a lot of natural light

and they did not need his Black Maria Studio

or his approval to make movies.

Finally, after a federal court decision in 1915,

the monopoly of Edison Trust was dismissed

as an unnecessary protection of patents.

(speaking foreign language)

Narrator: At the same time that Nikola Tesla

lost his property at Wardenclyffe,

Edison lost his Edison Trust.

In May 1915, Edison wrote in the New York Times,

"The government should maintain a great research laboratory

"where it could be developed

"all the technique of military and naval progression

"without any vast expense."

The US Congress allocated $1.5 million

for its implementation.

Edison agreed to serve

as the head of the Naval Consulting Board.

A Navy laboratory was set up

to experiment with wireless technology

and continue Nikola Tesla's work.

With Wardenclyffe, Nikola Tesla had described

the idea of internet and emails,

electric newspapers, and social media.

It was the US Navy laboratory that in the end

paved the way for the internet.

John Edgar Hoover,

who is credited with establishing the FBI in 1935,

was personally following Nikola Tesla.

That is why Tesla, for the last decades of his life,

never walked alone

and was always watched by his secret police.

- He was basically feeding pigeons in the park

'til the day he died,

and he's one of the brightest guys on Earth.

I can't even imagine how frustrating that must've been.

People just didn't listen to him anymore.

They didn't take him seriously.

Narrator: It is absurd that the man who invented radio

and wireless communication was in the end

the only one using the old way of communicating,

via pigeons.

They were the only way for him to communicate

with the rest of the city

without John Edgar Hoover and the FBI knowing about it.

- I met him myself.

He hugged me and kissed me like any good Serb could do,

and he understood in me

that I represented him as a younger person,

because he had an older brother who died,

I had an older brother who died, both accidentally.

And he saw in me a little bit of himself

as I was approaching his age.

- He cared about people.

Everything was from a humanitarian standpoint.

And to take a guy like that

and then have to put him in the mix of industrialists

and capitalists and the greed and fear

and the money game and all that,

how he survived all that is amazing.

I mean, he kept his integrity to his last breath.

Narrator: He should've been a billionaire,

but he died alone and penniless in a New York hotel room

on Orthodox Christmas in New York City in 1943.

The US Supreme Court finally decided

that Tesla was the rightful owner

for the patents for wireless communication after his death,

despite Marconi being awarded a Nobel Prize for this.

- He was forgotten for a while in the '50s and '60s.

Now, we have a resurgence of interest in Tesla.

There was a rock band called Tesla

here in the United States.

And of course, the selection by Elon Musk

of the name Tesla for his automobile

was a, I think, tremendous boost to Tesla's legacy.

It caused a lotta people to wonder,

"Well, who is this Tesla?"

(slow piano music)

- The idea of Tesla is not one

that many Americans grew up with.

It's sometimes hard for teachers

to understand even why or what.

In the morning, our students say the Inventor's Pledge,

and so it is a pledge to themselves

as well as to the school community.

Says, "Last night I was a dreamer

"and today I am an inventor.

"If I can dream it, I can imagine it.

"And if I can imagine it, I can create it."

- Nothing better than one man

change whole world what better can we ask for?

Paul: The interest in Tesla today

is people talk about the mythology so much

when they talk about Tesla.

Nobody's really been trying to understand

what he was talking about and what he did.

Humanity needs this stuff and we can't let this stuff die.

- Tesla's favorite machine was what he called

the self-acting engine, and it is a machine

that takes the heat of the ambient air

and it allows us to harness solar energy

at any place on the planet, 24/7.

- The good news is that renewable energy

is not only achievable but good economic policy.

This is not a partisan debate, it is a human one.

Clean air and a livable climate

are inalienable human rights.

And solving this crisis is not a question of politics,

it is a question of our own survival.

Narrator: In the end,

it was not only Tesla that was repressed,

but us, all of civilization.

He did his job.

He gave us all what he was living and working for,

and we are using almost all of his inventions today

but not for free as he wanted us to.

He said that the world was not ready for his invention.

It was too far ahead of its time.

But he also said that the same laws would prevail in the end

and make it a triumphal success.

Paul: And it has to be about his science.

Otherwise, his day is done.

We're never gonna get another genius like that ever again,

so we have to pick up where he left off.

And it's gonna take a whole bunch of minds

to do what this one mind did.

Nikola: Let the future tell the truth

and evaluate each one

according to his work and accomplishments.

The present is theirs.

The future for which I have really worked is mine.

My name is Nikola Tesla.

(pensive folk music)